– that’s not his history. You may call this “reform” – I call it something else all together.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITI…
Although Senator Obama had been an ardent voter registration supporter, when it came to his own campaign, he went out of his way to use technicalities and rules and any means necessary to toss out the voter petitions of his opponents.
As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.
The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.
“That was Chicago politics,” said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. “Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.”
Reformer? Not so much. Lest you think this was just a story about sour grapes courtesy of an incumbent, the remarks of a supporter are also included.
One other opponent who Obama eliminated by challenging his petitions, Gha-is Askia, said he has no hard feelings today about the challenge and supports Obama’s presidential aspirations.
But back at the time he was running for state Senate, Askia said, he was dismayed Obama would use such tactics.
“It wasn’t honorable,” he said. “I wouldn’t have done it.”
He said the Obama team challenged every single one of his petitions on “technicalities.”
If names were printed instead of signed in cursive writing, they were declared invalid. If signatures were good but the person gathering the signatures wasn’t properly registered, those petitions also were thrown out.
So – in the end? He’s a canny, clever politician. But he is NOT a reformer and never has been. He plays the same games the other politicians play but he’s been allowed to get away with calling it “reform”.
Kass, the Chicago Tribune columnist, said the national media are naive when it comes to Chicago politics, which is a serious business.
He said they have bought into a narrative that Obama is strictly a reformer. The truth, Kass says, is that he is a bare-knuckled politician. And using the rules to win his first office is part of who Obama is.
“It’s not the tactics of ‘let’s all people come together and put your best ideas forward and the best ideas win,’ ” Kass said. “That’s the spin; that’s in the Kool-Aid. You can have some. Any flavor. But the real deal was, get rid of Alice Palmer.
The actions are inconsistent with the message.
There are those who think that registering people to vote and getting them involved in politics and then using this tactic in terms of denying Alice Palmer the right to compete, that these things are inconsistent. And guess what? They are. They are inconsistent. But that’s the politics he plays.”
No wonder he’s worked so hard to keep Michigan and Florida from being counted! This man has a long history of this kind of stuff. And while it may have worked in Chicago, it just might bite him in the ass in the general election. People generally don’t take kindly to being disenfranchised.
